Ricardo Semler

Ricardo Semler was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1959, the son of an Austrian immigrant who had founded a small marine equipment manufacturing company called Semco. Ricardo studied law but was drawn back into the family firm, and in 1980, at just twenty-one, he took over as chief executive after his father suffered a heart attack, inheriting a business that was heavily indebted and close to collapse.

His early changes were conventional cost-cutting and staff reductions, and the strain of running the company nearly cost him his own health, leading to a collapse from exhaustion in his twenties that made him rethink what kind of workplace he actually wanted to run. Over the following years he dismantled much of the company's hierarchy, letting factory workers set their own production quotas, employees choose their own working hours, and staff vote on major decisions including who their managers should be.

He also made Semco's finances unusually transparent, teaching factory workers to read the company's balance sheets and letting employees set their own salaries, a system built on the belief that people trusted with real information and real power took it seriously rather than abusing it. The changes were viewed with suspicion by much of Brazilian industry at the time, but Semco grew steadily through the experiment and survived economic crises that damaged more conventionally run competitors.

Semler wrote two widely read books about the experience, Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend, and became an internationally sought after speaker on workplace democracy, arguing that most companies gave employees far less trust than they had earned.